Obama, McCain, and energy policy
Several of John McCain’s energy initiative ideas have been in the news lately. Aside from the totally preposterous gas tax holiday, he’s talking about lifting the federal ban on offshore drilling and awarding a huge prize for better battery technology. He also wants to build 45 new nuclear reactors within the next 22 years. (You can hear his June 17 energy policy speech here, thanks to NPR.)
Meanwhile, Barack Obama remains deeply connected to ethanol, a fuel additive made from cellulose. In the US, this generally means corn, and currying favor with the ethanol lobby correlates strongly with winning big in corn-growing Midwest states. As a senator from Illinois it’s unsurprising that Obama is involved with the ethanol industry. However, it’s scientifically ambiguous whether corn ethanol actually yields more energy than it takes to produce it — but either way it’s many times less efficient than ethanol made from sugar cane, which is a major export of Brazil, and on which there is currently a substantial tariff that Obama just happens to support. Also, the demand for ethanol corn drives up food prices. (Fuel corn and edible corn are different varieties, brags the American Coalition for Ethanol, seemingly ignoring the fact that that’s exactly the problem. Fuel corn is displacing edible corn being grown, making the edible kind more scarce.) Support for ethanol is little more than pandering to Big Agriculture, and that isn’t exactly bringing the change.
That’s not to say Obama’s position on energy policy is bad overall — far from it. His campaign website outlines his plans. He wants to spend $150 billion in clean energy technology and infrastructure over the next 10 years. He’s generally supportive of nuclear power, but has specifically proposed the goal of making 25% of US electricity consumption derived from renewable resources by 2025 (about double the current percentage). Obama is also in favor of a cap-and-trade system for regulating carbon emissions by auctioning off credits to the highest bidders.
And while I’m thrilled to hear McCain talking about big initiatives for technological developments and a serious effort to bring our nuclear power generation capabilities up to where they ought to be (I’m not so sure about the offshore drilling — it might be a reasonable thing to do, though it won’t have any effect on our oil supply for decades) his energy position does leave a bit to be desired. First of all, I don’t really feel confident endorsing the policies of anyone who thought the gas tax holiday was a good idea. (He’s still not letting it go!) Is he just throwing everything out there to see what sticks? McCain is also a proponent of cap-and-trade carbon regulation, but unlike Obama would give away most of the credits to firms that currently pollute the most — meaning less government revenue, and a reward for past pollution. He supports subsidies for nuclear power plants but not for solar or wind power, despite some misleading imagery in his ads.
A lot of good ideas have been proposed, but so have a lot of bad ones. Unfortunately, each candidate has a few from each category, so neither looks clearly in the right. The thing is, science isn’t naturally a political thing. It’s not about ideologies, and it doesn’t care about opinion polls. Wouldn’t it be nice if Obama, McCain, and their campaign staffs could sit down and brainstorm together, then pick and choose the best ideas from each? Lots more nuclear plants, auctioning off carbon credits, ending ethanol subsidies to corn farmers, supporting solar, wind, and geothermal generation… good policies are out there. Here’s hoping politics will get out of the way.
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